Sentences with phrase «tidal heating»
Tidal heating refers to the heating of a celestial body, like a moon or a planet, caused by the gravitational forces exerted upon it by another larger celestial body. This gravitational interaction creates a stretching and squeezing effect on the smaller body, generating heat due to friction. Full definition
Because the crust is lighter than the underlying mantle, gravity signals reveal variations in the thickness of the crust that were caused by tidal heating.
sciencedaily.com
Published in Science in 2010, the earlier study found that the shape of one area of unusual topography on the moon, the lunar farside highlands, was consistent with the effects of tidal heating during the formation of the crust.
The team thinks a combination of fluid and solid tidal heating effects may best explain all the volcanic activity observed on Io.
For the ocean to be liquid there must be substantial sources of heat — from tidal heating based on the shape of its orbits, or from heat emanating from radioactive decay and entering the ocean through hydrothermal vents.
«Still hot inside the Moon: Tidal heating in the deepest part of the lunar mantle.»
As a collision - generated moon adjusts to a more stable orbit, mutual gravitational attraction causes the interiors of the parent world and its new moon to repeatedly stretch and relax, generating friction that releases heat in a process known as tidal heating.
«It's hard to explain the regular pattern we see in so many volcanoes, all shifting in the same direction, using just our classical solid - body tidal heating models,» said Wade Henning of the University of Maryland and NASA Goddard, a co-author of the paper.
Their results indicate that variations in the thickness of the moon's crust caused by tidal heating during its formation can account for most of the moon's large - scale topography, while the remainder is consistent with a frozen tidal - rotational bulge that formed later.
Because their orbits are eccentric — not quite circular — these planets could experience tidal heating just like the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.»
Enceladus must be heated as it is squeezed and stretched by Saturn's gravity — a phenomenon called tidal heating.
«We found that the pattern of tidal heating predicted by our fluid - tide model is able to produce the surface heat patterns that are actually observed on Io.»
JS: It almost certainly has something to do with tidal heating, which is the mechanism that powers the volcanoes on Io.
One of the odd things is that there is another moon right next door called Mimas, where tidal heating should be operating much more efficiently that Enceladus.
[5] Such processes could include tidal heating, whereby the gravitational pull of TRAPPIST - 1 causes the planet to repeatedly deform, leading to inner frictional forces and the generation of heat.
They irrefutably demonstrate that «you do not need tidal heating to power ongoing geologic activity on icy worlds,» Spencer said.
Titan's eccentric orbit around Saturn generates tides that flex the moon's surface and create tidal heating, which could cause variations to develop in the thickness of the ice shell, Hemingway said.
The team found that tidal heating likely occurs on the five innermost TRAPPIST - 1 planets, b through f, becoming generally weaker moving away from the sun.
The team calculated the balance between tidal heating and heat transport by convection in the mantles of each planet.
The team used the equations for tidal heating and calculated its contribution to the «heat budget» for a wide variety of discovered and hypothetical TNO - moon systems, including the Eris - Dysnomia system.
Analyses performed by co-author Vera Dobos show that planets d and e are the most likely to be habitable due to their moderate surface temperatures, modest amounts of tidal heating, and because their heat fluxes are low enough to avoid entering a runaway greenhouse state.
The TRAPPIST - 1 system has been of great interest to observers and planetary scientists because it seems to contain seven planets that are all roughly Earth - sized, Barr and co-authors Vera Dobos and Laszlo L. Kiss said in «Interior Structures and Tidal Heating in the TRAPPIST - 1 Planets» that appears in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
However, the team has not ruled out the possibility of liquid water on the outermost planet, as it is possible that a phenomenon known as tidal heating, which is thought to be the driving force behind the eruptions taking place on the Jovian moon Io, could be warming the exoplanet.
«If you have a liquid water layer, the additional heat from tidal heating would cause the next adjacent layer of ice to melt.»
Most important, some of the ice below appears to have been melted by tidal heating from gravitational inteeractions of its mantle and core from its eccentric orbit about Jupiter and radioactive decay to create a deep global ocean of electrically conductive liquid such as salty water that generates fluctuations in the moon's magnetic pole (Walter S. Kiefer, 2002).
As on Io, tidal heating has energized Europa.
«Presumably the tidal heating is also replenishing the ocean,» Stevenson says, «so it is possible that some of that water is making its way up through the tiger stripes.»
«The fluid tidal heating component of a hybrid model best explains the equatorial preference of volcanic activity and the eastward shift in volcano concentrations, while simultaneous solid - body tidal heating in the deep - mantle could explain the existence of volcanoes at high latitudes,» said Henning.
«In 2010, we found one area that fits the tidal heating effect, but that study left open the rest of the moon and didn't include the tidal - rotational deformation.
Tidal heating and tidal - rotational deformation had similar effects on the moon's overall shape, giving it a slight lemon shape with a bulge on the side facing the Earth and another bulge on the opposite side.
Tidal heating would have caused the crust to be thinner at the poles, while the thickest crust would have formed in the regions in line with the Earth.
Mission scientists describe the findings as almost paradoxical, because the two worlds had been thought too small to sustain the internal heat that drives geologic activity on Earth, and they do not experience the tidal heating that drives such activity elsewhere in the outer solar system.
The paper also shows that planet c likely has a solid rock surface, and could have eruptions of silicate magmas on its surface driven by tidal heating, similar to Jupiter's moon Io.
The new research considers a phenomenon scientists refer to as «tidal heating,» a side effect of planetary orbital patterns.
How would tidal heating and decaying orbits affect the habitability of such planets?
These oceans were formed by tidal heating, that is, warming of the ice caused by friction between the surface ice and the core as a result of the gravitational interaction between the planet and the moon.
Depending on the mass of the planets and their distance from the brown dwarf, we should get Io / Europa analogues or, if it has enough mass to hold onto an atmosphere, we could get something different: a world that thanks to tidal heating (and infrared radiation) keeps the surface water liquid.
(The ocean stays liquid because of «tidal heat» created by the tug of Saturn's powerful gravity.)
«Crucially, our study also suggests that tidal heating could make deeply buried oceans more accessible to future observations by moving them closer to the surface,» said Joe Renaud of George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, a co-author on the paper.
The team would like to develop and use even more accurate models of tidal heating and TNO interiors to determine how long tidal heating can extend the lifetime of a liquid water ocean and how the orbit of a moon evolves as tidal heating dissipates energy.
«We found that tidal heating can be a tipping point that may have preserved oceans of liquid water beneath the surface of large TNOs like Pluto and Eris to the present day,» said Wade Henning of NASA Goddard and the University of Maryland, College Park, a co-author of the study.
Tidal heating or heat from the decay of radioactive elements could both create such hydrothermal vents, according to the team.
However far up it extends, a reservoir of liquid water is only possible on Enceladus because of tidal heating, which presents another interesting consideration.
Those calculations showed that tidal heating is strong enough that it could allow water to remain liquid under the surface of those objects.